#ronald hutton

[bedes-silliest-soldier]

Every BBC Historical Farm Series:

Alex, cuddling a lamb: “this is what farming is all about, you need to be connected to the land, it can be hard work but it’s worth it, it was how we lived for thousands of years…

Peter, knee deep in coal: “this is the orphan mangling machine — I need to be very careful as I shovel coal into it for the next 15 hours, but orphan mangling was such an important part of the British economy back then”

Ruth, vibrating with excitement: “women’s labor went unacknowledged but it was absolutely essential to running every household and business and nothing would have been able to run without it. Today we’re going to make strawberry jam, it’s going to be quite nice :) and it made up 2/3s of the actual monetary income of households in this period, while farming was for subsistence”

Professor Ronald Hutton, materializing out of thin air: “it’s spring, which means in this part of England — East Middle Shirelandiawalhamton — we have to tie sausages to our fingers and dance through the streets singing ‘tra-lee-la-lee-lay!’ Historically, this practice was accompanied by heavy drinking, and though it was banned by the Puritans, it never really went away.”

[dvoeverie-stitches]

Excerpts from Ronald Hutton’s Stations of the Sun on Folk Practices Concerning St. Brigid

Interspersed are photos of my own Brigid Dollies, beds, and crosses.

[hermionapollonerosdyionysos]

[elegantshapeshifter]

Ronald Hutton changes his mind on Witch-Cult Hypothesis: Many Medieval Witches were, indeed, Pagan!

In "Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe", Ronald Hutton shocks his readers with a new theory that overturns what he has claimed in the past!

If in his celebrated "The Triumph of the Moon" he categorically denied any connection between Medieval Witches and Paganism, he now dramatically changes his mind!

Hutton now acknowledges that Pagan cults have existed in the Middle Ages, but with a resounding twist: these cults would not have survived from antiquity, but would have been created *ex novo* precisely in Medieval times!

Instead of being direct heirs of pre-Christian religions, these Medieval cults would have retained a profoundly Pagan nature, even though they arose during a period dominated by Christianity.

Hutton thus challenges the old paradigm, arguing that these new cults, while not ancient, were much closer to Pagan spirituality in form and substance than anything Christian.

They were an independent system, expressing a Pagan approach to the sacred, unrelated to the dominant Christian traditions.

With this new book, Hutton not only breaks new ground in research on the Middle Ages, but challenges the idea that Pagan cults must necessarily be legacies of the distant past. Even in a Christianized age, there would have been room for the emergence of radically Pagan beliefs that had been overshadowed for centuries.

This new perspective sheds light on a Middle Ages far more complex and richer in alternative spiritualities than previously thought!

"Looking closely at four main figures—Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night, and the Old Woman of Gaelic tradition—Hutton challenges decades of debate around the female figures who have long been thought versions of pre-Christian goddesses. He makes the compelling case that these goddess figures found in the European imagination did not descend from the pre-Christian ancient world, yet have nothing Christian about them."

[breelandwalker]

Greetings, favorite witchstorian of mine!

For various reasons (being on the board of a college pagan organization), I have been called on to give a historical synopsis of the origins of Mayday and the maypole tradition.

I will not ask you to do my homework for me, of course, but do you know of any articles or resources that I could look to? Ideally ones which aren’t mainly citing horny and fibbing Victorians.

No rush on this; I’ve got more than a couple weeks, as I send this in.

Many thanks for your remarkable contributions to our community! I always appreciate your research and critical thinking :)

Oh fam, I've GOT YOU on this one.

Ronald Hutton, that's gonna be your guy. He's written a number of books about pre-Christian religion in England, as well as modern pagan religions and traditions. (I frequently recommend his Triumph of the Moon alongside Adler's Drawing Down The Moon for a nice rounded overview of the modern witchcraft movement.)

In particular, I think you'd be well served to read "Stations of the Sun" and "Pagan Britain." IIRC seasonal festivals feature heavily in both so there's probably a reference to a maypole in there somewhere. I know "Stations" in particular deals with challenging a lot of common assumptions about druidic rites that may or may not have existed and examining the historical evidence that we DO have. "The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles" might also have some information and possible connections to modern practices, since that also deals with the footprint that pre-Christian beliefs have left on modern thought.

There's also his article "Seasonal Festivity in Late Medieval England, Some Further Reflections," which is available on JSTOR and might have related information. I don't know if the material is included in the books previously mentioned, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be.

Good luck with your presentation!

[apilgrimpassingby]

One of my (current, at least) pet peeves is this: people acting like feminism has complete ownership over women having any kind of authority or autonomy.

The thing that set me thinking about this was Ronald Hutton (the UK's leading scholar on paganism ancient modern)'s lecture on the Great Goddess Theory - the (largely now abandoned) theory that Neolithic Europe was a peaceful matriarchy worshipping a single goddess, until the brutish Indo-Europeans brought bronze, war, patriarchy, male deities and polytheism. The really interesting bit of the lecture, however, was that British proponents of the Great Goddess Theory (like Jane Ellen Harrison, Harold Massingham and Jacquetta Hawkes) were, for the most part, ardent anti-feminists who thought that women should exalt themselves with art and child-raising and stay out of male spheres like politics.

And that got me thinking - what other examples of this phenomenon might there be?

One of the examples that immediately comes to mind for me is the Catholic Church. I know that many female Catholics consider it to be a religion of female empowerment, pointing to the numerous female saints and in particular the Mother of God. Nonetheless, it's clearly not a feminist institution, what with its all-male clergy and opposition to abortion.

Or for a more trivial example, the film The Craft. If you're not familiar with it, it's a 1990s film about a group of outcast teenage girls who start practicing the occult in order to solve their problems. While it's certainly a female empowerment film (it's all about women getting power, which is portrayed as an essentially positive thing, and the film has little love for its few male characters), I don't consider it a feminist film. That female power comes in the form of magic, which is heavily gendered (every character with any knowledge of or aptitude for magic is female, and the only term used for a magic user is "witch"), and the only one of the girls who uses mundane violence to solve her problems, Nancy, is the villain. Nor is magic a mere metaphor - the film's scriptwriter, Peter Filardi was an occultist who consulted with Wiccans and read books on the topic to ensure the accuracy of his film, and consequently the film is beloved by Wiccans and other neopagans.

Any thoughts on this, anyone?

[god-of-annwn]

Currently reading: Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton

[herbstroslein]

my new book 📖

THE WITCH: A HISTORY OF FEAR, FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE PRESENT by Ronald Hutton.